Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[Angrboda]

That's not what I mean by natural, so your objection is moot.  By natural I mean that the thing is obeying whatever nomological principles apply to its local reality.  A being in a predecessor universe may lack any of the necessary characteristics required of a god in being a mere subject of its own reality and also be the cause of this universe.  The prior universe need not obey the assumptions of the cosmological argument, so the case for a god as a cause stops there.

As you already know, the cosmological argument has very few assumptions, actually, one assumption: causality. Causality is a critical assumption. Honestly, I don't have a lot of respect for any position allowing for a violation of causality. It's not very good philosophy to reject the simplest principles of thought just to escape an argument.

I haven't rejected the principle of causality. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. Because we know nothing about any predecessor universe, we cannot say that such a universe began to exist and therefore the assumption stated in premise one of the cosmological argument does not apply to that universe. I haven't rejected causality.

You objected before to the "something can't give/cause what it doesn't have", this rule seems to be, however, competely valid inside our universe (conservation of mass), and can be justified outside of it.

You have a habit of conflating multiple arguments. The argument you're replying to did not contain the "can't give" objection and it is irrelevant to that argument. I will, however, answer it as a courtesy.

First of all, we weren't talking about mass in the question and the law of conservation was not violated by my answer. Theists suggest that a supervenient reason can explain why a good god allows evil, but when the same is applied to a malevolent god, that for a supervenient reason it would allow good, you want to object. It's the same reason! That you use it when it's in your favor and object when it is not is rank hypocrisy. What I suggested violates the can't give what you haven't got maxim without violating the law of conservation.

A cause of the universe can't be some inept entity, after all, it was at least capable of causing the entire universe with all what we know about it, including the marvelous arrangement of matter and natural laws. Since, from experience, we know we can't obtain an orderly machine or construction without hard work and a lot of willpower and determination, it seems plausible (more probable than not= its probability being true is >1/2) that a cause of the universe intended for these laws to happen. Attributing these laws to coincidence is not a solution, since coincidence already presupposes the existence of various objects that coincide with each other. A non-personal cause, if we were to apply the same rule in bold, can't yield personal agents.

You haven't shown that there is anything especially marvelous about the order of the universe. The problems with your analogy are twofold. First, the universe is not in any significant way like a machine, and so your analogy is as close to being useless as it can be. As Hume has stated the relevant point, insofar as the analogized is unlike that being compared, the analogy is weakened to the point of being incapable of carrying any argument.

The second problem is that we have explanations for the existence of humans that is wholly natural which would make machines simply a product of a long line of natural causes. If the point of your analogy is to suggest that like machines there is a wholly natural explanation for their origin then I wouldn't object, but we know you don't. Machines only make sense as an analogy if you postulate that some step in their creation didn't have a natural origin, but that would be begging the question.

As to presupposing that chance exists as a possible explanation, yes I am saying that. There is nothing objectionable about this because unless you have a deductive argument excluding chance then chance is at least a possible explanation. From there it is a matter of showing whether chance alone is a more probable explanation than the hypothesis of design, which contains many additional parts and assumptions. You'd need an extraordinarily compelling argument to overcome that difference, and you don't have one.

The common defeater along the lines of "natural laws permit complexity to arise from simplicity" is not an issue at all, because natural laws are part of the fabric of the universe, they are descriptive, not prescriptive, they describe its inner workings. Simply put, complexity arising from simplicity is an instrument of the designer/the cause of the universe, it's evidently part of its effects. So, one can't explain away the designer/cause by referring to other parts of the same design/effect.

So you're assuming the universe is designed so that you can exclude arguments from chance which would defeat your argument, thus allowing you to conclude that the universe is designed? That has to be one of the most transparent examples of question-begging that I have ever seen. You don't get to assume your conclusion, you have to argue for it. And since you don't have a deductive argument for it, all your arguments will be inductive which means they implicitly allow for the possibility of other explanations. Honestly, does this type of logic even work on your children?

You're faced with a Catch-22 -- either God is not master and commander, or else his aseity prevents him from being demonstrated.  As a Muslim, you can't give up Allah's role as master and commander, nor can you demonstrate his existence if that is not required -- because then he isn't above nature in his own reality.

Even if we assume no deductive argument is conclusive, we can still infer God's existence based on what we see in the world. I see appearances of order, I marvel at God's omnipotence. I see instances of caregiving, I admire God's benevolence, etc.  Islam endorses the idea of the sensus divinitatis (Fitra'), that is, I am simply tilted toward teleology and assigning agency to things. I should simply listen to this innate sense.

Yes, but if those inferences are contradicted by reason, then you follow them at your peril. Neither you nor I believe that reason isn't superior to unreason.

You can't consider all universes together because other universes may not obey the same principles that this universe does.  They can only be considered collectively if they do.

We already considerd many very different things together when we labeled them a universe. If at least one universe of a collection of universes violates causality, then I completely agree, no further arguments can be made (and welcome to sophistry), if not, then they have the principle of causality as a common governing principle, and we can still consider regress arguments.

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As noted above, I haven't dispensed with causality. Given that the cosmological argument relies upon the beginning to exist property to function, all universes must obey that property in order for them to be treated as one. You do not know if any predecessor universe has that property, so you can't group them together. End of story.